Top mistakes web designers make and how to avoid them

With the millions of websites on the Internet today and the thousands of others being added every day, it is absolutely essential for website designers to carefully chart out their website design if they plan to utilize the full potential of their websites and bring more customers in to maximize profits. While every business would want their website to be unique, there are some common mistakes that every web designer must avoid while designing a website, as even one mistake in the design can result in the loss of potential customers, which means loss to the business.

Here is a list, probably not an exhaustive one, but with hopefully some useful guidance when it comes to website design.

Don't overlook the Target Audience:

Every website is built in order to reach out to an audience. While any business would want to reach out maximum customers, the key here is to work keeping in mind the target audience. For a website to be successful, it is essential that the target audience in the specific market you're trying to reach is carefully researched and then used as a foundation for building the website.

Don't underestimate the Role of Content:

People visit the internet looking for information and if your website has exactly what they are looking for then that's half the battle and there would be no stopping to the amount of traffic your website can get. That's why, website designers and web design companies need to design the website in such a manner that it is well integrated with useful and original content that consumers seek.

Organize Content Layout:

While a website's content is what drives people to it, the way it is structured is what will make people stay on it and come back, thereby making the website a success. A common mistake that many website designers and web design companies make is that they just put blocks of content on the page without headings, sub-headings, bullets, keywords, paragraphs, etc. Users look for absolutely necessary information and scan through the page to find what they are looking for. A well-structured page with headings, sub-headings etc that tells users where they are and what information is available on that page is essential in order to keep them glued.

Avoid Poor Readability and Illegibility:

Many website designers and web design companies make the mistake of using too bright backgrounds that mask the text making it unreadable. Readability is a crucial element of web design. Of course, a good website interface design needs to grab the users' attention but users have to read the text to be able grasp the information they desire. If reading on the website is a pain, then be sure that the user will never return again.

Avoid Complicated Registration Forms:

For website designers and web design companies, acquiring contact details of potential customers might be the aim behind registration forms, however complicated and overtly lengthy registration forms can scare the user away. Always remember that users visit the website to acquire information and not the other way around. So, always keep registration forms simple and ask only those details that are absolutely essential from the user.
This is why it is important not only to design visually pleasing and navigation-friendly websites but create ones which are SEO-centric too. It is significant to learn a few tricks of website creation and not make 'killing' mistakes. Some such mistakes are mentioned below.

Creating Templates in the first place

Though WordPress, Magento and other Open Source platforms allow you to create terrific Templates at a very low cost, their SEO related deficiency cannot be underestimated. It is well known that templates are not Meta tagged extensively from the back end and hence they are very hard to read by search engines. Customized websites with unique contents are far easier to be crawled by Google's robots. Thus one can infer that creating websites with intense HTML tagging and CSS frameworks are far more suited to the task of SEO. It only helps that customized websites are also much more pleasing visually.

Avoid using Flash on the home page

Flash cannot be decoded by the robots of Google. Despite its brilliant algorithm, Google largely remains biased towards text. Thus, flash images on the home page can be detrimental to the fortunes of your websites. If you want to use them, you can get your websites worked over the JQuery platform. If you do not believe in this superb technique of java scripting you can introduce a Skip Intro page or create a Flash enabled and non-flash website simultaneously (both hosted on the same server)


Failing to use image optimization
Unless optimized with image based meta tagging, you will find the images suffering in hands of Google robots. For instance, if you are using the image of 'Dove shampoo' on your webpage, Meta tag the image with.txt. This way, crawlers will be able to fetch the content and also the text in its proximity.

Not creating sitemap in XML format

Sometimes website designers rely on creating a HTML sitemap forgetting that the XML format is more easily accessible by Google bots. This way, they miss out on showing each page 'in one go' to the robots and hence the websites turn out poorly indexed. Naturally, it affects the search engine rankings a great deal.

Not creating drop down menus

Adding a long list of main navigation bars can be really harmful for a website's SEO. It is much more viable to create fewer main pages and various drop down menus or sub pages to a website. A simple CMS can help in updating the sub pages as many times as you want. This way, a website owner doubles his privilege. As a first, he can put up new offers and discounts or change his images as many times as he wants. Second, the website gets terrific SEO boost.
Conclusion

With a professional hand to help you out, such mistakes can be easily avoided. Thus it is important not to go the DIY way if you are not well-versed with the art of making websites. Also, it is always better to do some research online and read academic articles on the "Mistakes to Avoid".